By MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
for Glasgow News 1
The City of Glasgow plans to advertise on Friday a request for proposals from developers interested in working with the former Johnson property; the company building the farmers market downtown expects to finally have it completed by Dec. 1; and the accounting firm that audits the city’s financial statements found they fairly presented the city’s financial position for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2024, but noted a few procedural concerns the city needed to address.
Those were among the highlights from three presentations to the Glasgow Common Council at its special-called meeting Monday evening that took up roughly 75 minutes of the total 110 it took to work through the full agenda, which included a few action items that Glasgow News 1 has reported about separately.
Mayor Henry Royse has said for months now that Qk4 and city officials have been working to produce a set of covenants and restrictions that any developer would have to follow to be involved with the project which is meant to have residential, retail and recreation components. The recreational portion is to include an indoor sports complex the county is planning to get constructed. The city has committed to providing 15 acres for that facility.
Rob Campbell, vice president of Qk4, an engineering firm the city hired to do a variety of surveys and due-diligence studies for the nearly 162 acres the city purchased last year and create conceptual designs of how it could best be developed, told the council those have now been finalized and the next step is to request development proposals, a “very important phase” of the project.
Campbell, the project manager for this plan, said they know of at least 10 companies that have expressed some interest already and to which they’ll directly send the RFP, but it will also be advertised publicly.
Campbell said those who are interested will have an opportunity for preproposal conferences and to visit the actual property. The proposals will be due just before Thanksgiving, he said, and once they have been received, an extensive evaluation process for those will take place that will likely take through the end of the calendar year, with a couple of the focuses being whether the company has the financial stability for such a project and what sort of creative vision do they have.
He said the RFP contains language that the city is not required to accept a proposal if it doesn’t find any deemed suitable, but if they do like one, the next step would be to negotiate the sale of the property. If that negotiation were to fall through, they would go to the next choice of developer.
Councilman Joe Trigg asked a question he said has been on the minds of many, and that’s when the city will be able to get its money back – the return on the investment.
Councilman Terry Bunnell said that, all along, this has been a long-range plan for orderly growth as well as having diverse types of potential revenue to the city, in addition to being an economic development tool.
Farmers market
Dylan Baker, CEO of Concentric Corp. of America, which is the company awarded the contract to build a farmers market facility along West Main Street just east of the post office after submitting a bid roughly half a million dollars lower than the next closest out of six bidders in November of last year, spoke briefly before turning the floor over to his colleague.
Later, it was noted that the contract wasn’t finalized until the last week of January.
Courtney Deaton, chief operating officer of Concentric, launched a visual presentation that included information about the company and then about the site itself and some of the reasons for delays.
During site preparation, the company discovered remains of the tobacco warehouse that had once stood at that location and had been buried there, which required full excavation of the site and removal of those materials, she said, altering the scope of work and adding to the timeline.
“Progress slowed due to unsustainable ground conditions from years of storm drainage watershed,” Deaton said. “We worked diligently with the hired engineer firm to remove [unsuitable] soils, properly install compacted aggregate and drainage to redirect storm waters for decades to come. With these steps now complete, the foundation is in place and construction momentum has returned.”
She said the recently poured concrete floor provides visible evidence of progress. Some of the next steps include finishing erecting the iron frame, exterior sheeting, interior finish work and paving/curbing. The timeline going forward calls for the building to be completely erected by the end of this month, sheathing completed by mid-October, interior finishing in early November and parking lot paving and exterior signage done in late November.
“December, Concentric will be turning over Glasgow’s farmers market to the city,” Deaton said.
The plan is for the city to lease the facility to Sustainable Glasgow, the nonprofit organization that manages the Bounty of the Barrens Farmers Market, the primary use for the building, but it would be used for other local events as well.
As she wrapped up, Baker pointed out a mistake on the slide presentation that Deaton had read, initially saying there were contaminated soils instead of unsuitable soils. He said no contaminated soils were found on this site, but unstable ones were, and those had to be replaced.
Councilman Freddie Norris asked whether the stormwater management is handled now, and Baker said it has been addressed after countless hours of work by Jim McGowan, city engineer and superintendent of the Glasgow Department of Public Works, and the engineering firm. He said reinforced headwalls are now in place to collect the water, “and it’s everyone’s understanding that it’s sustainable for an extended period of time.”
Bunnell asked about the costs compared with the budget, and Baker said there have been change orders due to some of the site requirements, but he didn’t anticipate any more change orders. He said McGowan had emphasized minimizing costs while maximizing quality.
When Bunnell asked for a figure of how much above the budget they were, Baker said he didn’t have that exact figure, and the mayor called McGowan to the microphone.
He said that when the unsuitable soils were found, they had to dig up an area roughly 40 feet by 50 feet and about 12 feet deep to remove that soil and replace it with what was necessary. He said he didn’t have the exact figures with him, either, but the soil replacement added about $95,000 to $100,000, and then recently another $75,000 to $80,000 for the finalized stormwater management design.
He said part of what held that up was a fiber conduit that was on this property and across the adjoining site of the future county justice center, and they had to wait to see what solution the designers for the other project came up with, and then changes had to be made accordingly. He said he also does not anticipate any other change orders.
“Anything that can be uncovered, we’ve uncovered it,” McGowan said.
He fielded some additional questions and comments about the preparation process, stormwater management and other related concerns, and he said in response to a question that it’s possible some of the cost will be reduced because the project has gone past the contracted 240 days, but that hasn’t been definitely determined. Some of the delay was due to weather, he said.
Baker said there have been several delays in the past month to six weeks, “all of which Concentric takes full responsibility and liability for.”
Audit report
Jeff Carter, a principal at Taylor, Polson & Co. accounting firm, which conducts the city’s audits on its financial statements, provided a somewhat briefer summary of the 128-page booklet he had already gone over with the council’s finance committee last week. The report covered the fiscal year from July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024.
The audit found, essentially, that the city’s financial statements for that period were a fair representation of its net position. He cited a few overall figures and told the group where to find other key data sets within the report.
He mentioned the number of concerns with internal controls and compliance that had been identified, but he did not list them individually. As Glasgow News 1 reported in detail after the finance panel’s discussion, there were three issues considered to be material weaknesses and six deemed as significant deficiencies.
A material weakness is a deficiency, or a combination of deficiencies, in internal control such that there is a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of the entity’s financial statements will not be prevented, or detected and corrected, on a timely basis, per the audit report.
A significant deficiency is one, or a combination more than one, that is less severe than a material weakness, yet important enough to merit attention by those charged with governance, according to the audit report.
City staff members have been in the process of compiling all the internal control processes and procedures to be followed into one comprehensive document, and Carter said that when that is done, it will help ensure compliance.
Carter fielded a few questions of a general nature about those things, making a statement similar to what he’d said in the committee meeting, that now that the concerns have been identified and reported, they can be addressed – and some already have been – and that will help prevent them from becoming larger issues. When they do the next audit, he said, one of the things they will check is the amount of progress that has been made in correcting the problems.
He and Bunnell both emphasized that the audit came back “clean” on the financial statements.
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